Un saludo,
Carlos

I do affiliate marketing myself and now live abroad but don’t make enough to do it full time and travel yet though.

Good stuff! 

Well the CPA in my example shows a quick and dirty example of conversion rates and values. A lot of businesses will factor in the cost of acquiring a new customer and the lifetime value of a new customer. Considering that you can continually email them through your newsletters, repeat orders etc. Even though the CPA might be $30 on the surface, the lifetime value of a new customer could be something like $100, which makes it worth acquiring new customers at a much higher cost.

As for different niches and performance across the engines, I’m not too sure. Very generally I’d say people who use Google are more likely to do their research more whereas Bing users are probably more impulse buyers.

Assuming a limited budget, would it be possible to reach the click volume of Adwords on Bing?

Granted, in your example, you did not profit on Adwords or Yahoo, though I’m wondering if some advertisers, with nearly unlimited budgets, would take a lower profit margin and conversions in favor of more revenue generated from more volume?

Also, are there certain niches that convert better on one network vs another? Even better question…which niche focus would not convert as well on Bing than on Adwords?

in my experiences, msn traffic converts the best(lowest CPA). you will always be wishing for more volume with MSN… Adwords on the other hand, can blow through any budget you specify, but it will usually be at a really high CPA more often than not, losing you money… you need to keep an eye on it and optimize/improve, especially in the beginning. Yahoo more or less fits in between the two, I haven’t gathered enough data yet on yahoo, but CVR is better than google, not quite as good as MSN, but acceptable!

For example, look at what’s happened to Acai berries. The only guys that I’ve seen running them explicit state they do not operate in the US. The only other rebill I consistently see anymore is for Force Factor, which is known as one of the most compliant merchants out there.

In short, I think the downfall of the rebill has really hurt the affiliate marketing world (obviously), but it will actually make for more opportunities in the future. There are still lots of keywords out there which have prices grouped around the $75-$85 dollar rebill model. As rebills become more scarce, the cost of advertising, as a whole should decrease as expected revenue drops. As the costs decrease, the opportunity for less scammy products to advertise themselves increases.